In 1999, after introducing a bold vision to transform the Army by 2030, General Eric Shinseki spent his first year as chief of staff of the Army communicating the urgency behind his transformation vision. “If you dislike change,” he stressed, “you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” Yet, as General Shinseki has described, this vision didn’t gain much traction initially and was met with resistance across the Army. The Army of 1999, which he argued was in dire need of change to maintain its relevance to the joint force, had just achieved overwhelming success in Operation Desert Storm earlier in the decade. So why the need to change?
Simply put, any potential adversary that paid attention to Desert Storm would certainly take heed to never engage in that type of fight against the US Army in future conflict. The Army that fought in Desert Storm was organized, trained, and equipped during the Cold War era to counter an invading Soviet force in Europe. It was not a force designed to respond to the wide variety of small-scale contingencies and nontraditional threats emerging in 1999.
Likewise today, adversaries have evolved to avoid conditions that favor a US Army that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades or one that is simply reintroducing Cold War doctrine as a solution to the challenges of large-scale combat operations. And the pacing threat is evolving faster than ever. Once again, the Army faces a choice between change and irrelevance. Maintaining relevance will require continuous transformation in contact. And given that the senior US military commander of the most strategically consequential theater has stated that the United States’ pacing threat, China’s People’s Liberation Army, would be ready to invade Taiwan over the next 18–24 months, it must occur now. How can the Army expect to appropriately transform in such a short period of time?
The Army as a Startup
In a 2021 interview, General Mike Murray, serving at the time as the commander of Army Futures Command, credited Eric Ries’s 2011 book The Lean Startup for the direction the Army was taking in transformation toward the force of 2030. In this book, Ries defines a startup as an “institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” In a competitive and uncertain environment, successful startups must demonstrate value and interact with potential customers, often through iterative experimentation, to determine what works and what does not. Just like the Ring doorbell, which transformed from a homemade solution to a personal problem of its inventor into the industry leader in camera doorbells, or how Airbnb was incubated from two air mattresses and grew into a worldwide phenomenon, the success of these programs was driven by an organization’s experience with the user, not necessarily the technology itself.
Not dissimilar from these examples, following its activation in 2017, Army Futures Command introduced a strategy of prototyping and customer-centered design through its initial eight cross-functional teams representing priority focus areas for modernization and acquisition of new technology. Recognizing the need for an organization to drive this change, in that same year, Chief of Staff of the Army General Mark Milley provided the initial vision for a new prototype formation along with additional guidance to begin supporting operations and exercises in the Indo-Pacific later that summer.
Operating as a startup within the Army, the Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) would treat new tools, new tactics, and new approaches the way innovative companies treat their products—as minimum viable products—and operationalizing the Army’s emerging multidomain operations concept in the priority theater. Indeed, the MDTF was itself the Army’s minimum viable product, destined to rapidly evolve as needs became apparent. Smaller than a brigade combat team, setbacks and failures for the MDTF would help the larger Army to make cost-saving decisions while refining concepts across the DOTMLPF-P spectrum (doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy) and simultaneously set conditions to support the joint force in a potential future conflict in the Indo-Pacific. With three MDTFs now active and two more on the way, each is designed to innovate and encouraged to take risks within a structured campaign of learning forward in priority theaters.
Mess Around and Find Out
At the small-unit level, organizations stay lean by being adaptive and agile. Unbound by DOTMLPF-P constraints, they are not limited by a structured approach to learning but, rather, value iterative experimentation that is agnostic toward experimentation objectives. In other words, because these units may actually have to fight with the equipment they are given, they value product performance over sales pitch. Regular deployment of MDTF formations into priority theaters provides an optimal learning environment and makes them the choice units for transforming in contact. This is best highlighted by recent and ongoing experimentation by Indo-Pacific MDTFs with subordinate prototype formations with new disruptive technologies in long-range fires, deep sensing, and joint all-domain command-and-control capabilities.
The Army’s first long-range hypersonic battery organized and began training even before it received any equipment. Despite initial skepticism from other services about the program and setbacks in live-fire tests, the decision to deliberately build concurrency into the activation program paid dividends. By moving forward with operational unit training and certifying while simultaneously working to prototype equipment, Army senior leaders were able to announce that the organization was “ready to go” upon fielding of the missiles. More recently, the unit’s integration into joint exercises has ensured that combatant commanders understand how to use the capability and, more importantly, that they can see that the system fills the capability gap it was intended to address. With recent successes in flight tests, the Army is far closer to bringing a new operational deep-strike capability to the joint force than it would have been if it had waited on the complete DOTMLPF-P solution ahead of delivery.
The extended-range sensing and effects company introduces deep-sensing capabilities and has been testing these capabilities forward since 2022. As the Army increases the ranges of its fires along with the addition of nonkinetic effects, it also runs the risk of being able to shoot farther than it can see. With changes in technology, we can expect that the future operational environment will be saturated with sensors across the subsurface, ground, aerial, and space layers. Using iterative experimentation with high-altitude and long-endurance capabilities across multiple theaters, the unit aims to meet commanders’ requirements for deeper and more persistent sensing, supporting decision-making and delivering effects. This company’s experimentation informs requirements for the entire Army as it aims to support the joint force’s theater-wide situational awareness and understanding.
The headquarters battery for the Army’s first indirect fires protection battalion will be one of the first to employ the Army’s new integrated battle command system (IBCS). While this emerging formation has an important responsibility to protect fixed and semifixed sites from rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, and even drone threats, IBCS possesses a scalable architecture to bring multiple sensors and weapon systems into a single unified network. A higher level of integration and interoperability across sensors and shooters from this battery’s engagement operations center would enable faster decision-making against a diverse set of targets across domains. Blurring the line between artillery and air defense artillery, this unit’s experimentation outcomes could fundamentally change the way we organize and employ fires capabilities distributed across a theater of operation.
Together, these organizations are both validating and invalidating concepts in theater, driving all other aspects of DOTMLPF-P development, and creating an operational capability at a pace relevant to the threat. Optimizing the potential value of these units to the joint force can only be achieved through unit-level experimentation, underneath a combatant commander and forward in the theater of operation alongside other partners with similar interests.
But Will it Scale?
Scalability is one thing that senior leaders must keep in mind with experimentation at the small-unit level. MDTFs are not a panacea for deterrence, nor can they be penny packets of soldiers spread across a theater. The Army continues to focus on divisions as the unit of action in a conflict scenario against a near-peer adversary, with a consequent need for the corps to synchronize multidomain effects at scale. Thus, it is important to determine how these units will integrate during different phases of the fight and how command and control might need to be enhanced to enable this integration.
While most of the efforts in the continental United States to develop new command-and-control capabilities are focused at the tactical level, MDTF experimentation with its distributed units in theater necessarily drives operational- and theater-level network requirements. Even with a lean approach, it is important to understand how new and emerging formations will fight alongside legacy ones. MDTFs, along with other land forces, set conditions for the return of air and maritime power, which, in turn, sets conditions for the arrival of larger land formations. Units within the MDTF work with and rely upon forward Army elements in the contact layer to solve tough problems, such as force projection and sustainment, ahead of the arrival of additional land forces. Experimentation conducted within these theater rehearsals both informs and sets conditions for the divisions and corps that will leverage the same interior lines built by forward elements. Additionally, this multidomain experimentation has helped to further refine concepts for new theater-level formations and cross-functional teams supporting transformation across multiple echelons and time horizons.
Ready or Not
Based on the army’s timeline for budgeting, the inputs for the Army of 2030 may already be in place. Concept-driven transformation is a necessary stage in the Army’s evolution, yet the aspirational future-gazing must not blind us to the threat in the current operational environment. Similarly, the Army should tread lightly when reintroducing old concepts; new approaches will be needed for the future fight, and these must be driven by new insights developed through experimentation. Experiments in the continental United States, such as Project Convergence, are a necessary step to drive transformation across the Army, but this must be paired with experimentation forward. Indeed, recent iterations of Project Convergence have extended into priority theaters. This is because technology and equipment may be disruptive, but not decisive. Technology designed to solve problems but untested by soldiers in the environment may actually punish untrained units and unskilled commanders. To keep pace with the number one threat in the national defense strategy, people and organizations must be the drivers of change and allow other elements across the DOTMLPF-P spectrum to evolve simultaneously. Realizing this, the Army is already developing new prototype formations.
Shortly after General Shinseki described his vision of transformation toward the Army of 2030, 9/11 served as a catalyst for change. Part of the plan involved a new vehicle, which would become the Stryker, and the first Stryker brigade was in Iraq by 2003. Absent a catalyst of this level, service-wide transformation at a pace necessary to respond to today’s near-peer threats demands agile and adaptable formations with a bias toward action ahead of the receipt of new technologies. The Army cannot afford to wait.
Lieutenant Colonel Ben Blane is a field artillery officer and commands the Army’s first long-range fires battalion as part of the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He holds an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy and graduate degrees from Columbia University and John Jay College.
Chief Warrant Officer Four Dale Hunter is an intelligence officer and formerly served as the senior intelligence warrant officer advisor in the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force. He currently serves as a readiness officer in the Department of the Army G-2. He holds an undergraduate degree from Excelsior College in Korean.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Bravo Battery, 5-3 FA (Long-Range Fires Battalion) deploys a long-range hypersonic launcher at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in support of a joint exercise, Resolute Hunter. (Credit: First Lieutenant David Kim, US Army)